The Separation of Church and
State was
printed in The Freeman, an obscure conservative monthly published by The
Foundation for Economic Education, Irvington-on-Hudson, NY 10533, volume 42 #6,
June, 1992, p. 214ff. Anyone may reprint this piece, provided proper
attribution is made and two copies sent to FEE.
The
Separation of Church and State
My father, Jacob, arrived in this
country as an immigrant in 1923. He
would have come here earlier, but was drafted for service in the Polish army in
1919 and, under the banner of Marshal Pilsudsky, helped fight Poland's
successful war against Trotsky and the communists. In America he joined his wife and son, who
had preceded him. He settled in Detroit
and opened a dry-goods store, begot two more sons (myself the second of the
three), throve and prospered. He died
last summer, aetat. 92, seven
years after the death of his faithful wife.
Fighting for Poland did not
particularly please my father, since as a Jew in Nasielsk, a small town near
Warsaw, he was never truly at home. The
distinction between Jew and non-Jew in the Poland of the Russian Empire was in
most ways more strict than the distinction between Negro and White in the
American South in, say, the period 1890-1915.
It had been a newly virulent sequence of pogroms, murderous mob attacks
on Jews and their goods and houses, that had generated the great emigration of
Polish (and other) Jews to America at that time. Jews feared Eastertide in particular, a time
when ignorant priests often preached the guilt of the Jews, and even fostered
the libel, widely believed among the Polish and Russian peasants, that Jews
used the blood of murdered Christian children in the making of Matzos for the
Passover.
But with the fall of the Czar and the
liberation of Poland one might hope for better times, even for Jews. My emigrating father left his own father and
mother in a new Polish Republic, reborn with his help and with that hope. The worst excesses of Polish anti-Semitism
did in fact diminish after the war, and in the end -- twenty years later -- it
was the Nazis, not the Poles, who organized the murder of those of his family
that did not follow him to America.
At my father's death last year I
collected some of his personal papers and among them found his Certificate of
Naturalization, given in the U.S. District Court of the Eastern District of
Michigan. It concludes, "IN
TESTIMONY WHEREOF the seal of said court is hereunto affixed on the ninth day
of July in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty-eight, and of our
Independence the one hundred and fifty-third."
The "year of our Lord"
1928? Much evil had been done, in the
name of that Lord, to my father and his family in Nasielsk. Too, Anno Domini 1928 was
equivalent to the year 5688 in the Hebrew calendar, which counts, instead of
the years since Christ, the years since Creation, the work of an earlier
Lord. Was not the language of the United
States Court for the Eastern District of Michigan a bit ethnocentric? Insensitive?
Did not my father feel left out of things, with his citizenship dated
according to a Christian tradition with its casual assertion that
"our" Lord was Jesus?
I must say that he did not. He never ceased to bless the United States of
America, from the day of his arrival to the day of his death.
He loved even the police because he
knew the nightstick was not intended for him, but for those who might want to
harm him. In Nasielsk, he told me, the
sight of a policeman would induce him to cross to the other side of the street
and pass at a distance; why take a chance?
Here in America, on the other hand, he would sometimes get a call in the
middle of the night, from a policeman telling him that he had left a door
unlocked in his store; "Best come round, sir, and lock it up
properly," the cop might say.
"Sir"? To a
Jew? It was a miracle, America.
I never asked my father what he
thought about the separation of church and state. It was not a question. They were separate here; he knew that, and he
also knew the Constitution required it so.
Everyone could attend the church of his choice, or no church at all, and
at school nobody asked the religion of his children, either.
But Christmas was a legal holiday;
what about that? – I might have asked him.
We sang Christmas carols at school; what about that? I might have asked him, yes, but I never did,
for it would never have occurred to him that these things constituted "an
establishment of religion." They
were merely an American tradition. We
were in a country that had been founded
by Christians, a country whose Constitution owed its structure to English
philosophers, all of them Christians; why shouldn't the echoes of these origins
remain in our public documents? There is
a difference, after all, between a Christian sentiment and a pogrom.
My father knew all this. In America we speak a language whose origin
is in England, and we follow a law whose origin is in England. Our very liberties, won "from"
England in 1776, had their origins in England nonetheless; there was nothing
like them in Russia either before or after their Revolution. My father arrived here in 1923; that it
should be styled Anno Domini 1923 did not make it for him
any less blessed a year, or restrict its boon to Christians alone.
Even so, I'm glad the Certificate of
Naturalization also included that other, more secular date, "and [in the
year] of our Independence the one hundred and fifty-third," for my father
(and I) owed a great deal to those who secured our independence, as the
celebration of the 200th anniversary of the Bill of Rights has recently
reminded us. But the Founders, who
insisted in the First Amendment that Congress should make no law respecting an
establishment of religion, had no intention of making religion, or its milder
echoes in our public observances, downright illegal. They knew as well as we that 1776, watershed
though it was, was still not The Beginning.
Unlike the French Jacobins who declared the date of their ill-fated
revolution to be Year 1, our American forbears saw danger in rejecting all
tradition, and they were right.
American Jews in 1791 were as free as
Christians, and they still are, nor does their liberty suffer from an
occasional Christian reference, whether in a prayer at the opening of Congress
or in a carol sung at school. It is not
words that tyrannize, after all, but evil intention. Communist Russia for seventy years oppressed
all religion and practically forbade all public religious expression. 1917 was Year 1 for their new order; Lenin be
praised! Did that make their Jews – or
anyone else -- free? Secure? At home?
I intend to have my father's and my
mother's naturalization papers framed for the wall of my study. I am proud of those documents, or, more
accurately, grateful. My parents came to
America so that I might be free. I will
point this out to visitors. It might be
that some of them, infected by ACLU propaganda, will be horrified by that
impermissible Christian reference, "in the year of our Lord," printed
right there on a United States Federal Court document. If so, I will explain:
"Well, it's not exactly my Lord
they're talking about, sure, but that's the way they said it in 1928. Maybe they still do. My father never saw any harm in it. 'Establishment of religion'? Don't make me
laugh."
Ralph A. Raimi
1991